BIG DEAL; Chelsea Building Swaps Muses, From Photography to Dance

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

Published: September 5, 2004

A DECIDEDLY blurry real estate picture is finally coming into focus for the photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Ms. Leibovitz, best known for her photos of celebrities in the magazine Vanity Fair, has sold her Chelsea studio and an adjoining building for $11.37 million to a fledgling dance and theater company sponsored by an heir to the Wal-Mart fortune.

At the same time, she has decided to forge ahead with the stalled renovation of a pair of Greenwich Village town houses, which turned famously disastrous two years ago when a damaged wall adjoining a neighboring building threatened to collapse.

Ms. Leibovitz, who currently lives in a penthouse in London Terrace in Chelsea, said she hoped to have structural problems with the town houses fixed by the end of the month, clearing the way for her to move forward with the renovation.

The sale last month of her Chelsea studio and office, she said, is a turning point that will finally make her move to Greenwich Village possible.

Ms. Leibovitz bought the Chelsea buildings at 537-547 West 26th Street -- twin one-story garages -- in August 1999. She declined to discuss the purchase price, but calculations based on city tax records indicate that the buildings cost $2.1 million.

She converted one of them into a studio and left the other vacant.

It became clear, however, that she didn't need so much space (the two buildings total nearly 14,000 square feet) and earlier this year, she decided to put them up for sale. She listed the property with Alf Naman, an independent broker, at an initial asking price of $13 million. It was later dropped to $11.75 million.

Mr. Naman said Ms. Leibovitz received offers to split the property but preferred a buyer who would use both buildings. ''Annie really felt the buildings had a lot of integrity as a pair,'' he said.

In the meantime, Lucy J. Ballard, the executive and artistic director of the newly established Cedar Lake Ensemble, had spent months fruitlessly searching for a theater the company could call home.

In late July, Ms. Ballard's broker, Ian Keate of the Corcoran Group, took her to see the twin garages, with their voluminous, column-free interiors.

''I was so elated,'' Ms. Ballard said. ''As soon as I walked in, bingo, it was absolutely the right place.'

Ms. Ballard called Nancy Walton Laurie, the owner of the Cedar Lake company. The two moved quickly, agreeing by the middle of August to buy the property for $11.37 million. On Aug. 27 Ms. Laurie closed the deal with a cash payment.

She is the daughter of James L. Walton, who helped his brother Sam start the Wal-Mart Stores chain. Ms. Laurie, who lives in Columbia, Mo., was ranked at No. 61 last year on the Forbes magazine list of the richest Americans, with a fortune estimated at $2.9 billion.

Two years ago, she persuaded Ms. Ballard to join her in starting Cedar Lake.

Today, the company consists of a ballet ensemble with 22 dancers and some 15 performances under its belt, as well as a nascent theatrical group that has yet to put on a production.

Ms. Ballard hopes to raise the curtain on the dance ensemble's first show in the new space next March. She has hired the architect Paul Byard of Platt Byard Dovell White, to create a theater with about 250 seats in the property's eastern half. That will involve raising the roof some 30 feet to accommodate technical needs. They plan to preserve the peaked facade of the garages, which were built in about 1915. The western structure will house offices and rehearsal studios. Ms. Ballard declined to say how much the renovation will cost.

As for Ms. Leibovitz, she also faces a complex renovation, but one with a more complicated history.

She bought the two 1830's town houses at 755 and 757 Greenwich Street in April 2002, for $4.15 million. The buildings had been carved up into rooming houses long before, and she began a renovation project intended to turn one building into a residence and the other into a combination office and nanny's apartment.

But in October 2002, work to excavate the basement of 755 Greenwich Street undermined a party wall with the building at 311 West 11th Street. The wall shifted (Ms. Leibovitz says it dropped four inches) and forced the evacuation of the family living next door.

The house's owner sued Ms. Leibovitz, charging her with trying to pressure him to sell his home at a below-market price. Local preservationists accused her of carrying out a reckless renovation that threatened to destroy the historical value of the homes in the landmark neighborhood. They even picketed her town houses.

Finally, after a rancorous year of charges and countercharges, in which Ms. Leibovitz was fined $1,000 for excavating her basement without a permit and was forced to shore up the damaged structures with hefty steel buttresses, she settled with her neighbor and agreed to buy his house for $1.87 million. (He had bought it for $712,500 in 1995).

On the advice of her lawyers, Ms. Leibovitz then put all three town houses on the market, through Mr. Naman, at a combined asking price of $7 million. Yet, despite all the difficulty, she had become attached to them, and eventually decided to push ahead with the work.

''I've always had a dream about living in the West Village,'' she said.

''I went out and looked at 12 other buildings, and I came back to these buildings and I said, 'I like this.' '' She added, ''I still believe in them.''